Easing the Bioinformatics Bottleneck: OnRamp Bioinformatics

According to Tim Wesselman, CEO of today’s featured provider OnRamp Bioinformatics, there are only 15,000 bioinformaticians worldwide today to support more than 2 million biologists and other researchers. As a result, analysis has become the rate-limiting step in next-generation sequencing studies, and very large datasets may go un-analyzed to the point of obsoletion.

To ease this bottleneck, OnRamp Bio offers services that empower researchers with insights that they can understand and put into action.

Software as a service: accessible bioinformatics for non-experts

OnRamp Bio has made significant progress in making bioinformatics accessible to larger numbers of researchers. Earlier this year, OnRamp Bio launched a new software-as-a-service for RNA-Seq analysis, to meet the needs of researchers needing assistance in making decisions based on the large data sets yielded by RNA-Seq experiments.

“IT complexity has stood in the way of progress for far too long. We’ve combined our deep knowledge of IT and biology to provide intuitive, integrated systems and services that accelerate mainstream adoption of NGS analyses within biotech and pharma,” said Tim Wesselman, CEO of OnRamp Bio. “For institutions focused on drug discovery, cancer research, diagnostic, or therapeutic development, OnRamp Bio can help show how to implement next generation sequencing to securely build into future research, while getting immediate answers more cost-efficiently.”

In addition to offering end-to-end genomic analysis services, OnRamp Bio recently made the news when it launched Rosalind™, the first-ever software platform specifically designed to simplify genomic analysis (named for one of the researchers who discovered the double helix structure of DNA).

Faces of OnRamp Bioinformatics

Jeremy Davis-Turak, VP of Bioinformatics, earned his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology in the lab of Dr. Alexander Hoffmann at UCSD, researching kinetic models of co-transcriptional splicing. In his studies, Dr. Davis-Turak developed analyses for RNA-seq, nascent RNA-seq, GRO-seq and MNase-seq that were intimately linked with mechanistic models. He set up the Bioinformatics Core at the San Diego Center for Systems Biology, optimizing pipeline for RNA-seq and ChIP-seq.

Jean Lozach, Chief Technology Officer, joined OnRamp Bio after more than 25 years experience in Genomics, Bioinformatics and Information Technology at Illumina and UCSD. Jean brought deep experience and knowledge of biology, wet lab operations, microarrays, and next generation sequencing together with advanced bioinformatics, software development and enterprise IT infrastructure. Jean is recognized as an industry expert in genomics and bioinformatics, and has led tens of successful customer deployments of next generation sequencing and informatics systems.

Roshni Patel, Bioinformatician, has helped complete many projects for OnRamp Bio’s clients. She earned her BS of Bioinformatics from the University of California at San Diego, and she is passionate about breaking down workflow complexity, improving data metrics and visualization.

What Science Exchange Requesters are saying about OnRamp Bioinformatics

OnRamp Bio’s storefront shows several testimonials from Science Exchange requesters. One review, in particular, applauds both the breadth and quality of their services: “I highly recommend OnRamp for their Bioinformatics expertise. I have worked with them on several genomics and metagenomics projects and the team is professional, completes the work on deadline and budget, and generated results we hadn’t expected. OnRamp will work with you every step of the way, from project inception, through interfacing with sequencing partners, through developing novel informatics solutions for your project. OnRamp’s bioinformatics platform has many unique attributes that make it appealing, but their data and analysis tracking is just amazing: provenance for all your analyses from the minute the sequences arrive.”

Chandreyee Das

Senior Content Manager

Chandreyee Das, Ph.D. (Chemical Biology, UCSF) is a Senior Content Manager at Science Exchange with 15 years of research experience and 12 years of life science content marketing experience. Chandreyee was a Fulbright Scholar and won fellowships from the U.S. NSF and NIH. Following postdoctoral research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, she worked at MilliporeSigma, delivering scientific content to life science tools customers. She has published in both peer-reviewed and industry news outlets.